Contributions in Merlin

The paper studies the role and the formulation of the survival assumption with incomplete markets. We are able to show the existence of a competitive equilibrium when the agents' endowments lie on the boundary of their consumption set. However, for this some additional assumptions with respect to the complete market case are needed. These are joint restrictions on the asset structure and the distribution of the endowments and preferences.

This paper proposes the following incentive scheme for the private provision of public goods: government should reward and penalize deviations from the mean contribution by an appropriate factor. This makes efficient contribution individually rational even if individuals see through the government budget constraint.

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Development of the Decision Support System (DSS) used by the National Emergency Operations Centre in Switzerland began immediately after the accident at Chernobyl. The system will evaluate acceptable countermeasures following the accidental release of radioactivity in order to reduce ingestion dose. The DSS - not designed for the very early phase following the accidental release of radioactivity - contains four different modules: threat assessment, generation of countermeasures, specification and multi-criteria decision-making at a technical and political level. The project is now in a consolidation phase and the DSS is used mainly for generating exercise scenarios and for training the decision-makers. The Swiss DSS was developed with the help of all the responsible persons and organisations in Switzerland, especially the Army Staff who support the National Emergency Operations Centre in the event of an accidental release of radioactivity. Following intensive contacts with the various user groups during the development phase, suggestions and corrections have already been included at a very early stage of the project. An additional database for use by the Army Staff has been installed so that consequences with respect to the most important countermeasures and criteria can be generated automatically. One of the National Emergency Operations Centre's most important experiences with this kind of decision support was the need to integrate the system into its standard operating procedures. Integration is important not only for professional use, but also for the maintenance (new releases) and updating of databases. Without clearly defined responsibilities, such systems quickly lose their value and important knowledge and experience gets lost. Operational integration, maintenance and updating of databases are the main tasks which have to be guaranteed if a DSS is to be ready for use and effectively to support the decision-makers in crisis situations.

Nous présentons dans cet article, la méthode d'exploration contextuelle (EC) et son application au résumé automatique de textes. Celle-ci s'appuie, pour toute analyse d'un texte, sur les connaissances linguistiques. La méthode confère ainsi à un système informatique, une autonomie par rapport à des descriptions du domaine : le système peut traiter des textes traitant de divers domaines. Le système SERAPHIN (Système Expert de Repérage Automatique des PHrases Importantes d'un texte et de leur Normalisation) a été réalisé pour répondre au problème du résumé automatique. Le système permet d'extraire les phrases les plus pertinentes d'un texte en vue de constituer un extrait susceptible de donner un aperçu sur le contenu du texte. L'extraction des phrases s'appuie essentiellement sur les indicateurs (qui attirent l'attention d'un lecteur) et les indices linguistiques co-présents dans un contexte donné. SERAPHIN est implémenté sous forme d'un système à base de connaissances. Il s'appuie, dans son analyse, sur un modèle objet qui représente la structure physique du texte traité. Le résumé constitué, sert de support pour aiguiller des utilisateurs vers la lecture ou non du texte en entier.

There are basic misunderstandings on derivative markets. Some professionals believe that they are a kind of casinos and have no utility for the investors. This work looks at the effects of options introduction in the Brazilian market, seeking for another benefit for this introduction: changes in the stocks risk leveI. Our results are the same found in the US and other markets: the options introduction reduces the stocks volatility. We also found that there is a slight indication that the volatility becames more stochastic with this alternative.

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